OTTAWA — Canada's auto industry is experiencing a renaissance as it transitions from building gas-powered vehicles to ones that run on batteries, but some are raising the alarm over the protection of local jobs.
Earlier this month, Canada's Building Trades Union called on Trudeau to intervene at the NextStar battery plant in Windsor, Ont., which is owned by Stellantis and LG Energy Solution.It said in a letter to Trudeau that 180 skilled workers in the region remain unemployed despite being available to perform work that has instead been assigned to newcomers.
Still, the union's executive director Sean Strickland said those are tasks that Canadian workers can already handle. Trudeau sidestepped a question about whether the agreement with Honda includes explicit protection for Canadian workers. Honda currently employees over 4,000 people in Alliston. They are non-unionized, but employees have held conversations around joining Unifor.
"We have seen before where Justin Trudeau announces massive subsidies that are supposed to create Canadian jobs, only to see him turn around and let those jobs be filled by foreign replacement workers and then lie about it," Sebastian Skamski, a spokesman for Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre, said in a statement.